Over 160,000 Discoveries Have Already Been Made In No Man's Sky

No Man's Sky has a big universe. Not infinite exactly, but it's still pretty damn big. Nonetheless, people have been busy exploring — so much so, that over 160,000 discoveries have already been made.

Sean Murray, the founder of Hello Games, revealed in an Ask Me Anything on Reddit that the studio was considering making an account for a Twitter bot.

The bot would have precisely one job: to randomly publish the names of discoveries from No Man's Sky, of which there are hundreds of thousands already.

"We've just been glued to the screen all day, watching names come in. Game isn't out ... but we had like 160k discoveries uploaded today," Murray mused.

No Man's Sky officially launches in Australia tomorrow for PS4 players, with PC explorers having to wait until August 12. Murray also confirmed in the AmA that those playing on PC would be on a separate server from their PS4 brethren, which could have added consequences when and if Hello Games decides to patch multiplayer into their space sandbox adventure.

I would be interested to know what the probability of this is.
Sure, 18 bajillion planets, but how many million players will they have day 1?
I am also curious how long it will take before I encounter another players discoveries?
Sorry, I like maths...

Someone did some wildly optimistic numbers. Assume 1 billion players have each already discovered 1000 planets so you've got 1 trillion discovered planets. Which he assumed was all within the middle 10% of the galaxy. You have a 1 in 18000 chance of each planet you visit being an already discovered planet (odds are you'd have to visit 18000 planets near the middle of the galaxy to find ONE that had been visited already)

Then the odds shoot off into the stratosphere of actually being in the same place at the same time as someone else.

TLDR: you're more likely to win the lottery 2 weeks in a row - in the optimistic example. Which is why they labelled it "Singleplayer" even though it's technically MMO.

one thing i loved in their twitch stream was when the game is loading it shows the movement thru the universe map and all the discovered star systems will actually have the names of the people who discovered them

No.
On odds of visiting previously discovered planet, see reddit link I posted above.
You should be good for about half the remaining time until our sun burns out. Past that the odds are you might find something.

Not comparing No Man's Sky to Elite Dangerous in any way here, but I have observed the odds of
people already claiming their planetary discoveries before you get there to be quite high provided everyone is dumped fairly close to each other but in a different system. I have traveled 10000ly back and forth from the human bubble in ED in several directions and it's been months since I found a system that was truly undiscovered. I have 1 to my name, and that's it.
Hopefully they will scatter people a bit further away from each other in No Man's Sky.

When I was younger, Resident Evil 4 looked so cool. I remember being so excited to play it. Then I found out that it was only going to be released on the Nintendo Gamecube, which I didn’t own.
My dreams were shattered because I was a dumb kid and didn’t realise that one day it would come to more consoles. Since that sad moment in my life, RE4 has been released on nearly every platform. And I can’t stop buying it every time a new port is released.